


Wandering Home

by Angelchexmex



Series: Home is Where Your Team Is [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Depression, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Late Night Conversations, Protective Hatake Kakashi, Suicidal Thoughts, Survivor Guilt, Uchiha Massacre
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-08-21 10:42:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16574903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Angelchexmex/pseuds/Angelchexmex
Summary: It's worse at night, when there's nothing to distract Sasuke from the gaping hole in his heart and the empty compound he lived in. So, when it got to be too much, Sasuke would go wandering Konoha until sunrise.This time, however, he's got an unwelcome guest in the form of his sensei's dog, Pakkun. Which, of course, leads to his sensei...offering to let him sleep over? This was not how Sasuke had planned the night to go.





	Wandering Home

**Author's Note:**

> So this is a companion piece to my fic Coming Home. I hope you guys like it! I'm not actually satisfied with it but well, here it is!
> 
> Comment and let me know what you think!

It's easiest to die at night, when ghosts whisper past and a heartbeat echoes in the empty house. Sasuke can hear them sometimes, whispering to him from the floorboards and watching him from the windows.

There's no one really there of course, and Sasuke knows that. The only time there is anyone in the compound other than him, and the ANBU no one seems to expect him to know about, is when civilian children find the courage to go snooping. Sasuke finds he doesn't hate that as much as he assumed he would, which is confusing. 

It should feel like desecration. It should make him angry because those people are making light of his suffering and the death of an entire clan. Instead, Sasuke almost enjoys the fact that they come by. It reminds him that the voices aren't real, that the screams he hears are just lies his imagination makes up. He hadn't even been there the evening Itachi had killed everyone. He'd come after they were all dead and gone. Dead and gone. Dead and gone.

Sasuke shuddered, pulling his blanket more firmly around him as he stared to the floor of his living room. He still slept in the main house, his childhood home. Not a single thing in it had been changed since it had been cleaned of blood. There were even some days, when he was hurt or when he'd fallen into a beyond exhausted sleep, that Sasuke would wake up and expect his mother to be walking down the hallways towards him. He'd round a corner and be shocked nobody was there. 

It hurt, and Sasuke was pleased. He wanted it to hurt, wanted to ache every time he breathed, because that way he would never forget. Because he was already forgetting.

He couldn't remember who his neighbor's had been anymore, or the names of the kids he had played with. He didn't remember the exact tone of his father's voice or the sound of his mother's laugh. 

It was the forgetting that hurt the most. It hurt the most because it felt like failing. It felt like everything that he was and everything that he was meant to be was just washing down the drain. It hurt but it was also empty in a way that rage fueled pain was not.

Sometimes, Sasuke wondered if that was what death felt like: pain and an aching yawning pit of absolutely nothing that sucked someone in and obliterated them.

Sometimes, Sasuke wondered if it was worth fighting against.

It was those kinds of thoughts that really kept Sasuke from talking to people, because, back when he'd actually gone to the therapist he'd been assigned to, people had worried about the way he spoke. They were afraid because of the dark remarks he made and the utter lack of care he took in his own well being.

So Sauke had learned to fake it. He'd learned to keep quiet about the things he needed to and pretend when silence wasn't enough. He focused on training and winning and killing Itachi because he had nothing else to live for. And if some part of him always knew that when the day came, it would be Itachi killing him instead, well, no one needed to know.

None of that, however, stopped the fact that sometimes it was all just too much. Sometimes Sasuke would wrap himself in a blanket and sit in the middle of his living room and just...stare.

Because the world was moving too quickly and he had too many things to do and he was so achingly, completely, and irrevocably alone. At night, with no one else in the compound, sometimes Sasuke wondered if anyone but him existed. If, maybe, he was stuck in some kind of genjutsu and he was the only real thing in the entire world.

Sasuke was always able to convince himself the next morning that sub thoughts were untrue and also completely crazy. 

Sasuke feared the day that the sun would make no difference and his thoughts in the dark would seem even more logical in the day.

It was those days that Sasuke found himself leaving his house in the middle of the night. He'd put on fresh clothes and wander the streets of Konoha, only other ninjas usually up at that hour. It helped, if only slightly, to be reminded of life outside of himself. To know that the world was still running and just because his own personal world had crumbled to dust long ago, didn't mean that everyone's had.

Team Seven had...helped with that a bit. 

Being forced to spend time with Sakura, Naruto, and Kakashi-sensei was almost pleasant, or rather as close to pleasant as anything Sasuke ever felt. But it made the nights seem longer and the days fly by too quickly. 

But dwelling on it wouldn't help anything. 

With a energy born of necessity, Sasuke stood up, shedding his blanket on the floor because there was no one but him to care, and made his way back to his room. He carefully didn't look at Itachi's as he passed, instead counting floor boards as he walked over them and slipping silently into his room. There was no reason to be silent, but it was night and it felt right. Sasuke lived in a graveyard after all and he should be respectful of that.

Sasuke changed quickly, slipping on his sandals last and hopping out his window. He broke into a run after that, finding movement easier now that he'd started moving. 

It was like that sometimes, the world was too static and moving at all felt like a monumental task, but once Sasuke did move it was easy. Momentum, once gained, was easy to build upon. Maybe that's why Sasuke was always training, because if he didn't force himself to keep moving he'd find himself stuck in that eternal moment when he learned that his brother had killed his entire clan. 

Or maybe he was stuck in that one moment and he was continually trying to escape. 

"Sasuke?" Sasuke reacted as any good ninja would and promptly threw a kunai at whatever had managed to sneak up on him. The whatever turned out to be Pakkun, on of Kakashi-sensei's ninken.

"Hn," Sasuke grunted, continuing to bound over rooftops as the dog followed him. He'd been paying far too much attention to a combination of his thoughts and staying on the rooftops. Kakashi-sensei had taught them to tree walk a while ago, but had only recently shown them how to extend that to other things such as rooftop travel and thus it still took a bit of concentration for Sasuke to not either slip off or blow up tiles as he ran.

"What are you doing up? Boss didn't wear you down enough?" The dog asked, because of course the annoying pug would decide to run with him. It was just like its aggravating master, always poking their noses into things they didn't need to know about.

"Hn," Sasuke replied, neither a positive or negative, just hoping it would convince the thing to go away.

"I'm out scouting," the dog continued, because obviously Sasuke had asked what it was up to and was just dying to know more.

"Boss is playing a game with Maito-san," and why did Gai of all people get an honorific when Sasuke didn't, "and I'm supposed to scout out to make sure Boss doesn't run into him."

"Kakashi-sensei is playing hide and seek?" Sasuke asked, his surprise making him accidentally engage with the pug instead of ignoring him like Sasuke had planned. Another thing that the dog and his master had in common: their aggravating ability to shock Sasuke into speech.

"It's fun," Pakkun defended, although he sounded more amused than anything else.

"It's late," Sasuke replied in confusion, figuring he'd already engaged so getting his questions answered was the least he could get in return for whatever suffering talking to the pug would bring.

"You're still up," Pakkun replied, part defense of his Boss and part question. Sasuke felt his shoulders tense at the probing, having almost forgotten his own purpose. What did that say about him, that he'd been in such agony as to run from his house but be so easily distractible that a simple pug could make him forget? Nothing good, obviously.

"Hn," Sasuke replied, hoping to cut the conversation short there. He was retracting his earlier thought that getting his questions answered was at all worth engaging.

"Boss stays up late too," Pakkun added casually, although Sasuke now doubted that there was anything casual about anything Pakkun had been saying. Sasuke had forgotten, stupidly, that this was a ninken and just as sneaky and intelligent as any ninja.

"You should talk to him about it."

"Not likely," Sasuke snorted, leaping into a balcony and stopping to glare at the stupid pug, who looked oddly smug. 

"What are you so happy about?" Sasuke questioned, suspicious and also more than ready to book it if need be.

"I'm always happy," Pakkun replied easily, wagging his tail to prove his point, "you're the one with the brooding issue."

"I do not-" Sasuke began, only for the door to the balcony he was on to open. Sasuke spun around, coming face-to-face with his sleep ruffled sensei. 

"What?" They both asked at the same time, although Sasuke was asking it of his sensei and his sensei was asking it of Pakkun.

"Late night delivery," Pakkun offered easily, "have fun!" And then the little demon ran away, disappearing over rooftops quicker than Sasuke would have thought such a short-legged creature could.

"You're not playing hide and seek with Gai-sensei are you?" Sasuke asked because that seemed like the only appropriate thing he could think of at the moment. 

"Meh," Kakashi-sensei shrugged, "Gai certainly things we are."

Which, alright that was a very Kakashi thing to do. "Rude," Sasuke offered and Kakashi-sensei smiled that annoying eye smile at him.

"What's rude is one of my cute little genin interrupting my sleep. So why did Pakkun bring you here?" Sasuke scowled again, reminded of the stupid terror.

"Don't know," Sasuke offered because he was a bit confused as to why himself. Sure the dog had told him to talk to Kakashi-sensei but he'd obviously been lying about Kakashi being awake and that meant everything that had happened was suspicious.

Kakashi-sensei hummed, stepping fully out onto the balcony and leaning next to where Sasuke was perched. "I don't like the night," Kakashi-sensei offered as a complete nonsequiter, "which is ironic seeing that it's the best time for a ninja to work."

Sasuke didn't much like nights either, so he understood that dichotomy well. "Hn," was all he offered though.

"I can hear their screams sometimes or I get stuck thinking about things I rather wouldn't. I can fell blood on my hands and I wonder sometimes if I'm a person who is sometimes a monster or a monster who is sometimes a person." Which was not what Sasuke was expecting at all. Sasuke turned to his sensei, studying his face and finding only honesty there as the other man stared out into the night.

"Sometimes it's better being alone and sometimes it's worse. You're lucky, you came on one of the nights it's worse," Kakashi-sensei offered, because he was offering something but Sasuke wasn't so sure what.

"It's always better in the morning," Sasuke offered back, wondering if that was the right thing to do, wondering why he hadn't just left.

"Better but never gone," Kakashi-sensei countered easily.

"But never gone," Sasuke agreed and, when Kakashi-sensei went back inside but left the door open, Sasuke followed him inside. Neither of them slept that night and neither of them talked, but that wasn't really the point. The point was to just have someone else there, to not be alone.

They didn't talk about it the next day, but, from then on, whenever it got to be too much and Sasuke was simultaneously too full and too hollow, he would go to Kakashi-sensei's house. Sometimes he'd sleep and sometimes they'd just sit silently in the kitchen and sometimes, only a very few times, Sasuke would talk.

Night weren't so scary anymore, because instead of walking the streets of Konoha alone, Sasuke always wandered home.


End file.
